Anonymous donor helped Gathering Church find home

Congregation moves into former First Christian Church in Downtown Evansville

photos by Kendall Brown / Special to The Courier & Press
Above: The Gathering Church has bought the former home of the First Christian Church of Evansville at 121 E. Walnut St. Top: The Gathering Church at Walnut and Second streets will have an open house at 2:30 p.m. Sunday.

Kendall Brown / Special to The Courier & Press
The Gathering Church at Walnut and Second streets will have an open house at 2:30 p.m. Sunday.

Members of The Gathering Church have come a long way in the past couple of years since they were invited to use the First Christian Church building in Downtown Evansville during the off-hours when First Christian members were not themselves having worship services.

The Gathering Church was founded in 2009 by Pastor Ray Brown, his wife, Nancy, and about half a dozen of their friends who began in 2007 as a mission-oriented group calling themselves Restore1Outreach Ministries, Ray Brown said.

The congregation, which now has about 120 members, moved into First Christian Church at 121 E. Walnut St. in 2010 and began holding religious services on Sunday afternoons.

In keeping with their mission roots, they also opened up for Monday night free dinners, weekly Bible study groups and outreach services for the city’s poor and homeless, including offering haircuts, hot meals, groceries, clothing, personal hygiene products and counseling services.

When the First Christian Church congregation moved out of the building in the fall of 2011, they put it up for sale but allowed The Gathering Church to continue leasing space and paying a nominal rent while trying to figure out a way to buy the building, said associate pastor Tony Metcalf.

That was accomplished earlier this year, Metcalf said, “with the help of a single anonymous benefactor, we own the building now, with a small mortgage we have 75 percent equity in it.”

At 2:30 p.m. Sunday, The Gathering Church members will have a dedication ceremony and open house celebrating the purchase.

The public is invited to stop in for guided tours and light refreshments, Metcalf said.

The Gathering Church is no longer the only organization using the building.

“This place is so huge; it has so many rooms. We have 29,000 square feet of space,” said Metcalf.

In addition to The Gathering Church’s own Celebrate Recovery program, the building is home to the Evansville Prayer Center (previously located on Oak Grove Road on the city’s far East Side), The Encounter Church (a church plant with Pastor Stewart Armstrong leading), two Bible study groups, an Alcoholics Anonymous group, the Mitochondrial Disorder support group Chrysalis (an encounter group for young adults) and the Homeless Outreach Ministry of Evansville (HOME), that supplies sleeping bags and other basic necessities to homeless people not living in shelters.

“We estimate that there are about 400 people using this building per week,” Brown said.